The modern Dutch mood in a nutshell: “I’m doing fine, we’re doing not so great”. If you’re middle class with a middle class job, your own home, in your forties or older, even the Covid pandemic could barely dent your comfortable life. Sure, you might have missed the water cooler talks with your cow-orkers, or have a little extra stress because now you have to work from home while your kids were bored from doing remote classes, but otherwise the greatest change was getting your groceries delivered rather than having to schlep them from the supermarket yourself. If you have money, if you have your own house, the Netherlands is a very comfortable country where you don’t have to do anything but work and consume and the news is just background noise that doesn’t really impact on ‘real life’.
Of course there are a lot of people who aren’t middle class, or don’t have a middle class job they could do just as well at home, who don’t even own their own house nor have a change to ever get one. There are also certain nice, middle class families who had everything but where branded benefit cheats by their own government based on suspicions rather than facts and who lost everything as a consequence: job, home, family. Most of the tens of thousands of people caught in this turned out to be people of colour or holders of another nationality besides their Dutch one. Turns out the tax ‘services’ think having a double nationality is a sign of fraud. One hesitates to argue that our government deliberately set out to destroy the wealth and welfare of its citizens of colour, but they hardly could’ve done better here if they planned it. Thousands of families destroyed, tens of thousands of people chased into debt, millions wasted on prosecuting them. Incidently, did you know our prime minister was once found guilty for encouraging racial discrimination? Pure coincidence, I’m sure.
The phrase ‘met mij gaat het goed, met ons gaat het slecht’ comes from an ex-director of the Dutch government’s Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau (Social and Cultural Planning Organisation), Paul Schnabel, who coined it in 2018 already, before Covid and before we learned how badly the state treats the citizens it doesn’t like. It’s not just taxes, in almost every part of its interactions with its citizens the state behaves like we’re the enemy. In child care for example, due to budget cuts and decentralisation and the sheer incompetence within the services this created, increasing numbers of children have been taken out of their families, sometimes to end up in prison because there are no youth shelters available. We also see it in the hostile policing of the demonstrations for social housing, where police kettled, attacked and arrested peaceful demonstrators. We see it in the refusal to tackle climate change, where despite court orders, little concrete is done and climate destroyers like Shell still get huge subsidies. There’s also the destruction of legal aid, now no longer available for any civil case involving the state, leaving the average citizens helpless against a legal system already prejudiced towards the state.
And yet, despite this, despite the fatal mishandling of the pandemic these past two years, we’re apparantly still so comfortable with how our country is run that we re-elected the people responsible for it earlier this year. This by the way also shows the arrogance of the ruling party, the VVD and its leader, Rutte. Despite finally taking some responsibility for how the tax services had ruined the lives of tens of thousands of people last year and resigning, Rutte had the chutzpah to put himself forward as leader again — and we re-elected him! How is that possible? Mathieu Segers thinks it’s a symptom of general Dutch complacenty, where we assume without evidence that we know what’s best and we don’t need to learn from anybody foreign. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, we know that the Dutch way of doing things is the best, we live in the best country in the world and any criticism is just foreing jealousy, or whinging from losers. If that sounds familiar, yes, we have a lot in common with the English even as we mock them for being so stupid as to fall for Brexit. The mote in another’s eye and all that.
The core of Segers’ argument resonates with me:
Dit vreemde gedrag ging hand in hand met hardvochtigheid naar buiten toe, en richting alles wat anders is of lijkt dan Nederlands. Het is een houding die past bij de comfortabele berusting die hoort bij ‘met mij gaat het goed, met ons gaat het slecht’, en die kenmerkend is voor het merendeel van de hedendaagse Nederlandse bevolking. Vanuit deze houding is keihard beleid ten opzichte van een ieder waarvan die meerderheid het idee heeft dat hij of zij anders is (en dus verantwoordelijk kan worden gehouden voor het ‘met ons gaat het slecht’-deel van het gevoel in het land) al snel legitiem. Dat bleek en blijkt.
Summarised, the incuriosity and forgiveness we have towards ourselves in general and our government’s handling of Covid in particular, goes hand in hand with an extreme hostility against anything foreign or non-Dutch. There is no solidarity with people who are not like us, as seen in the hostile attitude at the start of the pandemic towards Italy and their proposal to establish an EU Covid recovery fund. You also see it in that whole tax scandal I described above: that was the consequence partially of laws being written to punish foreign benefit cheats, making being foreign a sign of fraud on its own, even if it was never explicitly stated as such. We have a state with laws that protects but does not bind the in group, — middle class, white property owners, tax cheating multinationals, climate destroyers — but does not shelter the out group: anybody not Dutch. And a large part of the population is more than comfortable with this.
‘met mij gaat het goed, met ons gaat het slecht’ — that’s the consequence of twenty-plus years of neoliberal consensus changing the state from an instrument to help and protect people back into one that’s hostile towards its own citizens. With nothing to expect from the state and with the seeming failure of the state to listen to its people, a part of the population has decided that as long as they’re comfortable, they don’t care. Just keep the mortgage subsidies coming.
